A reader asks: Why is Linux still not as user friendly as the two other main OSes with all the people developing for Linux? Is it because it is mainly developed by geeks?
My initial feeling when reading this question was that it was kind of a throwaway, kind of a slam in disguise as a genuine question. But the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I felt. There truly are a large amount of resources being dedicated to the development of Linux and its operating system halo (DEs, drivers, apps, etc). Some of these resources are from large companies (IBM, Red Hat, Novell). Why isn't Linux more user-friendly? Is this an inherent limitation with open source software?

I agree. It is a common problem in open source that developers do not even want their programs to work correctly.

As a real-world example: XFCE has a bug, developer confirms that it's a bug, knows how to fix it (it's easy, even I could do it), but DOESN'T WANT TO!
The reason for this madness is that the current design is clean and elegant, and any way of fixing it would make the design less elegant and be a "hack".

Linux suffers from this old Unix idiom (quoted from the Unix hater's handbook):
• “Being small and simple is more important than being complete and correct.”

But worse, Linux also suffers from the new Linux idiom:
• “Since everything is already so big and kludgy and full of useless features, one more hack doesn't matter for the obscure feature that I, the developer, wants.”

It really is the worst of two worlds. No one wants to make programs behave correctly and be done with it because the programs would become too complex. Everyone wants their silly feature in regardless.